Half of that difference (115 gals / year) comes from the bump from 40mpg to 65mpg - so more than doubling the gas mileage from 65 to 150 only makes about 100 gallons of gas difference per year.
Make one truck that performs the same duty as other large similar trucks, but increases mileage from 10mpg to 20mpg and you save 6x as much gas as you save by increasing the gas mileage on a Prius from 65 to 150.
Plus, can you imaging the compromises they'd have to make in order to get a car that holds four people and luggage, yet still gets 150 mpg?
The difference between a 35mpg car and a 50mpg car is only about 100 gallons of gas per year per car.
The law of diminishing returns comes into play somewhere in the 35-40mpg range - anything beyond that and the cost in making it get better mileage far exceeds the savings experienced. They will get a lot better ROI coming up with a way to replace cars / trucks in the 15mpg range with cars / trucks that get 25mpg, than trying to wring out anything over 40mpg from a normal size utility vehicle. A Prius is nifty, gets 50mpg or thereabouts - but the unofficial word on the street is that because of all the crazy stuff they have to do in making them (hint : tons of batteries contribute mad amounts of sick shit into the environment) makes their overall pollution footprint about the same as a Hummer H2.
Just a good tuneup, proper inflation in the tires, driving senseably and putting a 'current gas mileage' meter on the dash board so drivers get instant feedback on how their driving habits affect gas mileage - could add 2-4mpg to the worst offenders. Couple that with the 'not having to buy a new vehicle this year' proposed above and that's a pretty sizable impact for a lot less money.
I think the intelligentia are saying is that the counter-rotating shaft will need as much torque on it as the primary shaft, because the final drive speed is a ratio of the difference of the speeds of the two counter-rotating inputs.
Sure with no load on the system the counter-rotating shaft doesn't need to be powerful, just run as fast as the input shaft - but if you add to the equation a heavy load (ie, moving a 3000# vehicle by making the tires spin) then the sum of the torque from the 'primary' motor pushing against the resistance to torque from the drive shaft - you're going to need as much torque on the counter-rotating input as the regular input lest it be the weak link and overwhelmed by the other two forces.
That is the part they (and I) are having a hard time wrapping our heads around. Not that it's not viable (two electric motors of the same strength, one on each input), but it's not what he is describing. That said (I haven't watched the demo yet) if he has an electric motor on the input shaft and a similar sized electric motor on the control shaft, that is EXACTLY what I'm saying - scaling the system up means scaling up both motors, not just one.
Assuming 1000 miles per month (which is what most leased cars are allocated) : The difference between a 150mpg car and a 250mpg car is 32 gallons of gas per year per car. The difference between a 30mpg car and a 40mpg car is 100 gallons of gas per year per car. The difference between a 20mpg car and a 30mpg car is 200 gallons of gas per year per car. The difference between a 15mpg car and a 25mpg car is 320 gallons of gas per year per car. The difference between a 12mpg car and a 22mpg car is 450 gallons of gas per year per car. The difference between a 10mpg car and a 20mpg car is 600 gallons of gas per year per car.
Read from bottom up, you see the point of diminishing returns.
If car companies would focus on the right range (forget about exotic expensive 150+ mpg carbon fiber hybrids that hold two people, focus on 30+mpg vehicles that hold a family and gear) they would have a LOT more impact. I don't necessarily agree with the way cash for clunkers was handled, but in the cases where people traded in a 12 mpg car and drove off in a 22mpg car - it makes a BIG difference.
He could go all SCO on them and decide after the fact to charge them $700 per user for license fees on the original (pre-employment) code... probably get him fired, but if there are 5000+ users of the code it would be worth it.
Actually it's really, really simple. Find out who is doing your annual review, and who is responsible for promoting you when the time is right. This is generally the same guy. Then find out what his goals are for the year.
Do whatever it takes to make this guy hit his goals, with respect to anything you are working on. If you are working on something that isn't one of this guy's measured goals, you are wasting your time (and possibly adding negative perceived value to yourself.) If this guy has a goal to get a certain package out the door, working correctly and delivered to production, by December 31st - then that is your goal.
Your goal is to have the code production ready and in the hands of the customer by Dec 31. Not to schmooze with the cool kids. Not to make pretty code. Not to refactor working code code or database tables so they conform to J2EE inheritance standards or 3rd normalized database standards or whatever. Not to come up with a cool way to reduce CPU utilization of the application by 4%. These are tasks you may or may not accomplish on the way to your goal, but your goal is to deliver code on time, and make the manager and team look good in the process.
You do that and you will do very well in your professional pursuits.
You might want to check what the Tea Party is up to. It sounds to me like a combination of strong political backing and pissed off empowered people.
People tend to forget the fundamentals of 'good' and 'evil'. Driving 61 in a 55 isn't evil. If you apply the fundamentals of good and evil, if there is no victim, there is no crime. Putting the country closer to an Orwellian Big Brother with cameras monitoring our every move is evil, and we are all victims of that evil (being deprived of our Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.)
The guy in the van forgot that. If he had been more focused on doing good than evil, he'd still be alive. Funny thing is - he probably convinced himself that he was doing the 'right' thing, and was enthusiastic about doing it. Ditto the shooter.
This is already happening in the US. They convicted a guy in Florida of a murder that happened in the NorthEast (like NY or Boston or something) based on his FastPass hitting the toll booths between the two. Granted it wasn't camera shots per se, but the technology is there and they are using it.
If one had had a flat I would have had no choice but to hit them!
For future reference you don't have to wait for one of them to get a flat to hit them. Just do the speed limit and stay in your lane and you will hit them regardless.
Re:Quoting himself now? Megalomania
on
Life Recorder
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It's a gargoyle rig as described in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, circa 1992. It was a good idea. Not an original idea, but a good idea nonetheless.
My company provides me with a decent laptop and the $10 keyboard / mouse combo that comes when they click the little box next to keyboard / mouse (+$10). Within a few days I've tossed those and replaced them with nice high end keyboard / mouse. If I feel like I can get away with it I might even bring in my IBM Model M keyboard. Even the laptop is nice enough, but when I need to get some serious computing done I go home to use my hardware - a cluster of multi-core servers on a GigE backbone that combine to somewhere in the neighborhood of 24GHz of processing power, 12G of memory, and 2TB+ of drive space, with three huge LCDs as the user interface.
Funny thing is - as powerful as my current rig once was there's a strong possibility I will scrap the entire thing this year and build a new cluster on newer technology. A cluster capable of 100GHz (1/10th of a terahertz - damn!) is easily within the reach of high end professionals if they are serious about having that kind of horsepower at their fingertips. I estimate the current cost of such a system at right around $10k, and by Christmas probably about half that.
And no, my company isn't buying it for me. It's coming right out of my pocket.
I hired on with a company in the Boston area a few years ago, and a significant benefit was full tuition to pursue my Masters in CS at one of the Boston Universities part time (after work, weekends, etc.) Same GPA stipulation you mentioned.
Anyways, it took me four years but I graduated - shiny new MS/CS in hand. Two months later the project I was working on finished and I found out I was being laid off (with about 100 other people that wave.) My only question - "About that $30,000 you guys invested in my education... ?" Answer : "Nope, you're all set. Have a great life."
That was a year ago. I'd go back and work for them in a heartbeat if they called, but in the mean time I'm working out in the real world making about twice what I was making working for them.
parents are naturally suspicious and afraid they might lose their children (to the goverment).
Can you blame them? Have you ever heard a positive story about the family courts or interaction with child protective services? There are men out there in life I hate enough not to hit the brakes if they walked out in front of my truck, and I ~still~ wouldn't send CPS to their house on an anonymous tip.
Does the author think traditional hard drives write to byte-addressable boundaries? Hard drives write blocks and sectors too and have wasted slack space at the end of their blocks too.
Novell was doing block suballocation as long ago as Netware 5.x, which came out in roughly 1998. It's not a completely invalid assertion.
Other than that, excellent rundown on the issues. Thanks.
During high school I was a swimmer / water polo player. Every day we spent 1-2 hours in the pool swimming laps or playing polo. That's it. A friend was on the football team and one day I went to watch him during practice - the entire team was 'doing bleachers', meaning they were sprinting up and down the bleacher seats (effectively running up and down a flight of stairs.) When I asked him about it later, explaining that it looked like bullshit to me (there are no stairs on the football field, so why run up and down stairs?) he explained 'if you can't handle 'doing bleachers', you can't handle being a football player.'
It doesn't take calculus to code most of the stuff I work with today as a software engineer, but I honestly wouldn't want developers on my team that couldn't at one point in their lives handle calculus. They don't have to be able to do it today, but at one point they needed to show that they could master it (mentally). If you can master calculus (even for a brief period of time during undergrad) then you're probably the caliber of man I want tackling the difficult problems that come up coding some of the stuff we code. If not, probably not.
Pretty much off topic, but don't underestimate the fiscal impact of a teen working a summer job flipping burgers for minimum wage or mowing lawns for $20 apiece. Sure a recent college grad working a new job may make a solid $40k a year, but they are also paying a LOT of fixed costs (apartment, student loans, car payment, insurance, utility bills, grocery bills, etc.) - after all the fixed costs are paid it isn't unusual to hear that young adults working 'real' jobs are barely breaking even, or only have a few hundred ($100 to $400) each month in discretionary cash. A two month summer part time job paying minimum wage could leave your kid with $750 a month in discretionary cash, and even a part time job during the school year could score an easy $250-$500 a month in money they can spend on whatever they like (they would have more discretionary income than most people I know.)
For the last year and a half of undergrad I had a job working at the local television station. For $5 an hour (about 1.5x minimum wage, pretty good at the time) 40 hours a week - I was doing pretty good for myself. The position essentially boiled down to watching TV 8 hours a day (it was a little more technical than that, but the technical part became second nature and I was basically watching TV 8 hours each day.)
When I graduated and got a 'real job' and went off into the real world... I stopped watching TV. Nobody was paying me to watch TV, so why would I watch TV for free? Seemed stupid to me for people to watch television for hours at a time, for free.
Envision the practical applications of this theory - paying someone briefly for undesirable behavior, then stop paying them - they won't do that any more.
What did you do to prompt those beatings? Just curious. Whatever it was, I bet you quit doing it.
I started to write 'To this day I don't know why drinking milk out of the jug is wrong, but I damn sure don't do it.' but the truth is that I didn't get beat for drinking milk out of the jug - I got beat for lying about it to my dad. So thirty years later I still drink milk out of the jug, but I damn sure don't lie about it (or anything else. Ever. It's actually a condition of my employment : I will never be asked to lie about anything to anyone.)
I'm not saying getting beat by our parents was a good thing, but here's to hoping we're better people as a result.
Rewarding the results is long term thinking and it appears to be good. Envision rewarding the behavior that leads to good results in the first place : how about paying her $2 for every book she reads, and $5 for every practice SAT test she takes, and other proactive type rewards. I'm not a professional on the matter, but I can only envision the difference on the her report cards and on the real SAT when she sits down to take it in earnest.
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Half of that difference (115 gals / year) comes from the bump from 40mpg to 65mpg - so more than doubling the gas mileage from 65 to 150 only makes about 100 gallons of gas difference per year.
Make one truck that performs the same duty as other large similar trucks, but increases mileage from 10mpg to 20mpg and you save 6x as much gas as you save by increasing the gas mileage on a Prius from 65 to 150.
Plus, can you imaging the compromises they'd have to make in order to get a car that holds four people and luggage, yet still gets 150 mpg?
Law of diminishing returns.
The difference between a 35mpg car and a 50mpg car is only about 100 gallons of gas per year per car.
The law of diminishing returns comes into play somewhere in the 35-40mpg range - anything beyond that and the cost in making it get better mileage far exceeds the savings experienced. They will get a lot better ROI coming up with a way to replace cars / trucks in the 15mpg range with cars / trucks that get 25mpg, than trying to wring out anything over 40mpg from a normal size utility vehicle. A Prius is nifty, gets 50mpg or thereabouts - but the unofficial word on the street is that because of all the crazy stuff they have to do in making them (hint : tons of batteries contribute mad amounts of sick shit into the environment) makes their overall pollution footprint about the same as a Hummer H2.
Just a good tuneup, proper inflation in the tires, driving senseably and putting a 'current gas mileage' meter on the dash board so drivers get instant feedback on how their driving habits affect gas mileage - could add 2-4mpg to the worst offenders. Couple that with the 'not having to buy a new vehicle this year' proposed above and that's a pretty sizable impact for a lot less money.
I think the intelligentia are saying is that the counter-rotating shaft will need as much torque on it as the primary shaft, because the final drive speed is a ratio of the difference of the speeds of the two counter-rotating inputs.
Sure with no load on the system the counter-rotating shaft doesn't need to be powerful, just run as fast as the input shaft - but if you add to the equation a heavy load (ie, moving a 3000# vehicle by making the tires spin) then the sum of the torque from the 'primary' motor pushing against the resistance to torque from the drive shaft - you're going to need as much torque on the counter-rotating input as the regular input lest it be the weak link and overwhelmed by the other two forces.
That is the part they (and I) are having a hard time wrapping our heads around. Not that it's not viable (two electric motors of the same strength, one on each input), but it's not what he is describing. That said (I haven't watched the demo yet) if he has an electric motor on the input shaft and a similar sized electric motor on the control shaft, that is EXACTLY what I'm saying - scaling the system up means scaling up both motors, not just one.
Assuming 1000 miles per month (which is what most leased cars are allocated) :
The difference between a 150mpg car and a 250mpg car is 32 gallons of gas per year per car.
The difference between a 30mpg car and a 40mpg car is 100 gallons of gas per year per car.
The difference between a 20mpg car and a 30mpg car is 200 gallons of gas per year per car.
The difference between a 15mpg car and a 25mpg car is 320 gallons of gas per year per car.
The difference between a 12mpg car and a 22mpg car is 450 gallons of gas per year per car.
The difference between a 10mpg car and a 20mpg car is 600 gallons of gas per year per car.
Read from bottom up, you see the point of diminishing returns.
If car companies would focus on the right range (forget about exotic expensive 150+ mpg carbon fiber hybrids that hold two people, focus on 30+mpg vehicles that hold a family and gear) they would have a LOT more impact. I don't necessarily agree with the way cash for clunkers was handled, but in the cases where people traded in a 12 mpg car and drove off in a 22mpg car - it makes a BIG difference.
He could go all SCO on them and decide after the fact to charge them $700 per user for license fees on the original (pre-employment) code ... probably get him fired, but if there are 5000+ users of the code it would be worth it.
Actually it's really, really simple.
Find out who is doing your annual review, and who is responsible for promoting you when the time is right. This is generally the same guy. Then find out what his goals are for the year.
Do whatever it takes to make this guy hit his goals, with respect to anything you are working on. If you are working on something that isn't one of this guy's measured goals, you are wasting your time (and possibly adding negative perceived value to yourself.) If this guy has a goal to get a certain package out the door, working correctly and delivered to production, by December 31st - then that is your goal.
Your goal is to have the code production ready and in the hands of the customer by Dec 31.
Not to schmooze with the cool kids.
Not to make pretty code.
Not to refactor working code code or database tables so they conform to J2EE inheritance standards or 3rd normalized database standards or whatever.
Not to come up with a cool way to reduce CPU utilization of the application by 4%.
These are tasks you may or may not accomplish on the way to your goal, but your goal is to deliver code on time, and make the manager and team look good in the process.
You do that and you will do very well in your professional pursuits.
You might want to check what the Tea Party is up to.
It sounds to me like a combination of strong political backing and pissed off empowered people.
People tend to forget the fundamentals of 'good' and 'evil'.
Driving 61 in a 55 isn't evil. If you apply the fundamentals of good and evil, if there is no victim, there is no crime.
Putting the country closer to an Orwellian Big Brother with cameras monitoring our every move is evil, and we are all victims of that evil (being deprived of our Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.)
The guy in the van forgot that. If he had been more focused on doing good than evil, he'd still be alive.
Funny thing is - he probably convinced himself that he was doing the 'right' thing, and was enthusiastic about doing it. Ditto the shooter.
Old grannies playing BINGO in a Bingo hall
Rule 34.
No exceptions.
One Bing to rule them all.
That one's sweet, no doubt - but better than the intro to Quake II?
That's a tough one.
This is already happening in the US.
They convicted a guy in Florida of a murder that happened in the NorthEast (like NY or Boston or something) based on his FastPass hitting the toll booths between the two. Granted it wasn't camera shots per se, but the technology is there and they are using it.
If one had had a flat I would have had no choice but to hit them!
For future reference you don't have to wait for one of them to get a flat to hit them. Just do the speed limit and stay in your lane and you will hit them regardless.
It's a gargoyle rig as described in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, circa 1992.
It was a good idea. Not an original idea, but a good idea nonetheless.
It's similar with IT folks too, I imagine.
My company provides me with a decent laptop and the $10 keyboard / mouse combo that comes when they click the little box next to keyboard / mouse (+$10). Within a few days I've tossed those and replaced them with nice high end keyboard / mouse. If I feel like I can get away with it I might even bring in my IBM Model M keyboard. Even the laptop is nice enough, but when I need to get some serious computing done I go home to use my hardware - a cluster of multi-core servers on a GigE backbone that combine to somewhere in the neighborhood of 24GHz of processing power, 12G of memory, and 2TB+ of drive space, with three huge LCDs as the user interface.
Funny thing is - as powerful as my current rig once was there's a strong possibility I will scrap the entire thing this year and build a new cluster on newer technology. A cluster capable of 100GHz (1/10th of a terahertz - damn!) is easily within the reach of high end professionals if they are serious about having that kind of horsepower at their fingertips. I estimate the current cost of such a system at right around $10k, and by Christmas probably about half that.
And no, my company isn't buying it for me. It's coming right out of my pocket.
I hired on with a company in the Boston area a few years ago, and a significant benefit was full tuition to pursue my Masters in CS at one of the Boston Universities part time (after work, weekends, etc.) Same GPA stipulation you mentioned.
Anyways, it took me four years but I graduated - shiny new MS/CS in hand. Two months later the project I was working on finished and I found out I was being laid off (with about 100 other people that wave.) My only question - "About that $30,000 you guys invested in my education ... ?" Answer : "Nope, you're all set. Have a great life."
That was a year ago. I'd go back and work for them in a heartbeat if they called, but in the mean time I'm working out in the real world making about twice what I was making working for them.
parents are naturally suspicious and afraid they might lose their children (to the goverment).
Can you blame them? Have you ever heard a positive story about the family courts or interaction with child protective services? There are men out there in life I hate enough not to hit the brakes if they walked out in front of my truck, and I ~still~ wouldn't send CPS to their house on an anonymous tip.
Why wait until after the child is a criminal? Perhaps the time to make a difference is when the child is younger and could grow in either direction.
Building a brighter tomorrow doesn't have to be about punishment.
So is there any gray area in this bad / good prediction business, or is it pretty much black and white?
Well there was that whole 'first man in space' thing.
See also, Yuri Gagarin
It also invests money into "private" companies as a way to funnel public money into the hands of corrupt connected individuals.
FTFY
Does the author think traditional hard drives write to byte-addressable boundaries? Hard drives write blocks and sectors too and have wasted slack space at the end of their blocks too.
Novell was doing block suballocation as long ago as Netware 5.x, which came out in roughly 1998. It's not a completely invalid assertion.
Other than that, excellent rundown on the issues. Thanks.
During high school I was a swimmer / water polo player. Every day we spent 1-2 hours in the pool swimming laps or playing polo. That's it.
A friend was on the football team and one day I went to watch him during practice - the entire team was 'doing bleachers', meaning they were sprinting up and down the bleacher seats (effectively running up and down a flight of stairs.) When I asked him about it later, explaining that it looked like bullshit to me (there are no stairs on the football field, so why run up and down stairs?) he explained 'if you can't handle 'doing bleachers', you can't handle being a football player.'
It doesn't take calculus to code most of the stuff I work with today as a software engineer, but I honestly wouldn't want developers on my team that couldn't at one point in their lives handle calculus. They don't have to be able to do it today, but at one point they needed to show that they could master it (mentally). If you can master calculus (even for a brief period of time during undergrad) then you're probably the caliber of man I want tackling the difficult problems that come up coding some of the stuff we code. If not, probably not.
Pretty much off topic, but don't underestimate the fiscal impact of a teen working a summer job flipping burgers for minimum wage or mowing lawns for $20 apiece.
Sure a recent college grad working a new job may make a solid $40k a year, but they are also paying a LOT of fixed costs (apartment, student loans, car payment, insurance, utility bills, grocery bills, etc.) - after all the fixed costs are paid it isn't unusual to hear that young adults working 'real' jobs are barely breaking even, or only have a few hundred ($100 to $400) each month in discretionary cash. A two month summer part time job paying minimum wage could leave your kid with $750 a month in discretionary cash, and even a part time job during the school year could score an easy $250-$500 a month in money they can spend on whatever they like (they would have more discretionary income than most people I know.)
For the last year and a half of undergrad I had a job working at the local television station. For $5 an hour (about 1.5x minimum wage, pretty good at the time) 40 hours a week - I was doing pretty good for myself. The position essentially boiled down to watching TV 8 hours a day (it was a little more technical than that, but the technical part became second nature and I was basically watching TV 8 hours each day.)
When I graduated and got a 'real job' and went off into the real world ... I stopped watching TV. Nobody was paying me to watch TV, so why would I watch TV for free? Seemed stupid to me for people to watch television for hours at a time, for free.
Envision the practical applications of this theory - paying someone briefly for undesirable behavior, then stop paying them - they won't do that any more.
What did you do to prompt those beatings?
Just curious. Whatever it was, I bet you quit doing it.
I started to write 'To this day I don't know why drinking milk out of the jug is wrong, but I damn sure don't do it.' but the truth is that I didn't get beat for drinking milk out of the jug - I got beat for lying about it to my dad. So thirty years later I still drink milk out of the jug, but I damn sure don't lie about it (or anything else. Ever. It's actually a condition of my employment : I will never be asked to lie about anything to anyone.)
I'm not saying getting beat by our parents was a good thing, but here's to hoping we're better people as a result.
Parental involvement - good job.
Rewarding the results is long term thinking and it appears to be good. Envision rewarding the behavior that leads to good results in the first place : how about paying her $2 for every book she reads, and $5 for every practice SAT test she takes, and other proactive type rewards. I'm not a professional on the matter, but I can only envision the difference on the her report cards and on the real SAT when she sits down to take it in earnest.